Litigators

As the top lawyer for President Barack Obama — first in the Senate, then on the campaign trail, later in the White House Counsel’s Office and now back on the campaign — Bob Bauer reigns as the marquee political lawyer in Washington.

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But talk to operatives, regulators and competing lawyers around town, and they’ll tell you that Bauer’s partner at the Perkins Coie political practice he founded, Marc Elias, has become the go-to lawyer for a wide range of Democratic politicians who don’t live at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. — and for other folks as well.

“For members of the House and Senate, there is no Democratic-side campaign finance lawyer who is more important than Marc Elias. That is without a doubt,” said Robert Lenhard, a former Federal Election Commission chairman who is representing an outside advertising group backing Obama. “While Bob Bauer served as White House counsel, Marc led that practice group and it thrived under his tutelage.”

Elias, a quick-talking, Twitter-savvy 42-year-old, represents a veritable who’s who of Democratic power players, from Sens. Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee to a trio of new outside groups with close ties to party leaders that are angling to spend tens of millions of dollars on ads attacking Republicans in the 2012 elections — Majority PAC, House Majority PAC and American Bridge.

And while the 6-foot-4 New York native is a regular — and garrulous — presence at FEC meetings, his work for his clients has extended to helping craft legislation (as he did with last year’s failed DISCLOSE Act, which would have restricted the outside groups he’s now representing), advising them on avoiding illegal coordination with those groups — and even pinging reporters whose tweets misrepresent his clients’ positions.

Elias has also developed niches in redistricting fights and post-election litigation, emerging as a star of the dramatic eight-month-long recount battle following the 2008 Minnesota Senate race, which ended with his client, Democrat Al Franken, unseating former Republican Sen. Norm Coleman. Since then, Elias has been called in to shepherd Mark Dayton through a 2010 recount en route to winning the Minnesota governorship, and this year, he advised the legal team for the ultimately unsuccessful liberal candidate in the early stages of a recount in a bitter Wisconsin state Supreme Court race that was watched nationally as a proxy for Republican efforts to clamp down on labor union power.